I purchased a copy of the revised edition of Pharr's Homeric Greek shortly after the Univiversity of Oklahoma Press released it. The copyright year is given as 1985 so that must be close to when I bought it. (The price back then was $11.95) I didn't notice anything unusual until one day I tried to look up a word in the Greek - English vocabulary at the back of the book. I couldn't find it there so I rechecked the spelling, rechecked my recall of the alphabetic order, flipped through all pages of words beginning with kappa (that's the first letter of the my target word) and still could not find it.

Finally, I noticed something strange. The last word on page 330 is Κάλχᾱς and the first word on page 331 is κῆλον. That seemed like a rather large alphabetic gap. The page numbers are consecutive and I don't see any missing numbers anywhere in the book. (Note that the pages were renumbered from Pharr's original edition due to various edits - some deletions, some insertions - by John Wright.) Hmm.

A quick comparison against the original edition, as available here on Textkit, shows that an entire page of the vocabulary is missing from my copy. Page 360 in the original edition matches page 330 in my edtion while page 362 in the original matches page 331 in mine. Thus, my copy has omitted the contents of page 361 from the original edition!

So, I am wondering whether more recent printings have corrected this oversight or whether the error still remains. Anybody care to check their copy and report back? (caveat lector indeed!)

I must have a copy from the first printing since it gives no indication of a printing number. It's good to know that they corrected their error.

I just noticed that in my copy the content of pages 331 and 332 are the same. They are recto and verso of a single leaf so to correct the error all they had to do is supply the correct contents for page 331. They rest of the book's layout remains the same.

As with software, so also with books -- sometimes it's best to avoid the 1.0 release

The GoogleBook pdf is so much "heavier" than the Textkit version, and not of the same overall high quality as found in the Textkit version. The GoogleBooks version is not as convenient to use, navigating back and forth inside the document noticeably slow.

One could always insert in the Textkit version the missing pages from GoogleBooks, in order to have a complete book version. However the page formats do not seem to be the same, bringing a lack of uniformity in the document.

nov.ialiste wrote:How does the revised edition differ from the original?

Mostly in the notes on the Homeric Text. Pharr was prone to some seriously tangential commentary. Wright trimmed away some of those, and in early chapters wrote headers explaining some grammatical material helpful to people who might not already have studied Latin.